Wacom Inkling — Could be Just What Designers Need

So what exactly is the Wacom Inkling?  Many in our space are familiar with the Adapx pen which allows for capturing forms and other simple data inputs from special paper.  The Inkling is sort of the right brain answer to the left brain Adapx.  So what exactly does the Inkling do and why would I pay $199 for it?

Simply put, Wacom designed the Inkling to be a digitizer that works on any piece of paper.  That’s a huge difference from the Adapx pen which requires their special paper with dots on it.  This means the Wacom pen can be used like an “ordinary” pen.  Draw what you want and there it is.  This is great for designers, but it means that the Adapx pen and the Wacom Inkling are after two different markets.  There is no OCR or other recognition software, it just captures what you write as lines (heck, these are vectors baby!).

The Wacom Inkling has a very nice travel case that contains everything you need to use the pen.

So what do you get with the Inkling?  The case that the Inkling comes in does a great job of holding all the pieces together and charges the pen and receiver when plugged into a USB port using the included cable.  The pen itself is a tad thinker than I’m used to which means that id doesn’t always feel quite right in my hand.  But for GeoDesign type applications, it is probably going to work out fine (think of writing with a sharpie size pen).  It takes regular ink refills which is great in that it isn’t going to cost you, but the thickness was greater than I’m normally used to.  I suppose you could get different refills, but I didn’t test that out.

The Inkling Receiver clips on to any piece of paper.

The Inkling Receiver clips on to your paper and uses some sort of infrared connectivity to figure out where the pen is.  You can see the infrared beam area at the bottom of the receiver in the picture above.  Yes, this means that if you put your hand in front of that beam, the pen becomes lost.  It quickly rediscovers it, but you’ll want to keep that in mind while drawing.  The other important fact about the receiver is that it only works on paper 8.5×11 inches or smaller.  That means you can’t clip it on to some huge ANSI E plot and start working, you have to make smaller plots to work with.

You clip the receiver to the top of the paper and start writing.

                     As you can see in the picture above, you clip the receiver on the paper and just start working with it.